Advisory Board Members

Dr Horst D. Simon 

Director, ADIA Lab

Prior to joining ADIA Lab as its inaugural Director in 2022, Dr Simon was at Berkeley Lab from 1996, having served previously as Deputy Director for Research, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences, and Director of NERSC. In his role as Deputy Director, Dr Simon was instrumental in the creation of new concepts such as Cyclotron Road and CalCharge that support energy innovation and forge stronger connections of the national labs with industry.

He has been honoured twice with the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize, in 2009 for the development of innovative techniques that produce new levels of performance on a real application (in collaboration with IBM researchers) and in 1988 in recognition of superior effort in parallel processing research (with others from Cray and Boeing). He has received the ACM SC Test of Time Award, and the SIAM CSE Career Award. He is a member of the team publishing the biannual TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers, and he is a SIAM Fellow. 

Dr Horst Simon is an internationally recognized expert in the development of parallel computational methods for the solution of scientific problems of scale.  His research interests are in the development of sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and domain decomposition algorithms. His recursive spectral bisection algorithm is a breakthrough in parallel algorithms. He has 40 years’ experience in high performance computing and numerical algorithms. He has worked in industry (Boeing, SGI), in research labs (NASA Ames, Berkeley Lab), and in universities (Stony Brook Univ., UC Berkeley)

Professor Shafi Goldwasser

Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and the C. Lester Hogan Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley

Professor Goldwasser was the recipient of ACM Turing Award for 2012. She was also the recipient of the Gödel Prize in 1993 and another in 2001 for her work on interactive proofs and connections to hardness of approximation, and was awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1996), the RSA award in mathematics (1998), the ACM Athena award for women in computer science (2008), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science (2010), the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (2011), the Barnard College Medal of Distinction (2016),  the Suffrage Science Award (2016), the  BBVA Frontier Knowledge Award (2017), the Loreal Unesco International Women in Science Award(2021).

She is a member of the AAAS, ACM, NAE, NAS, Israeli Academy of Science, London Mathematical Society, the Russian Academy of Science and a foreign member of the Royal Society. She holds honorary degrees from Oxford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University, University of Haifa and University of Waterloo.

Professor Steven Chu

William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular & Cellular Physiology in the Medical School at Stanford University

Professor Chu is an internationally renowned scientist who was named co-winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics alongside Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light". Over recent years he has focused on the search for new solutions to energy and climate challenges, both as US Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013 and, before that, as Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where he explored alternative and renewable energy technologies.

Professor Chu has made important contributions in atomic physics, quantum electronics, polymer and biophysics including tests of fundamental theories in physics, the development of methods to laser cool and trap atoms, atom interferometry, the study of polymers and biological systems at the single molecule level, molecular biology, medical ultrasound imaging, nanoparticle synthesis, batteries and other applications in electrochemistry.

The holder of 20 patents, Professor Chu has published more than 300 scientific and technical papers. He is a member of numerous scientific societies including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Academia Sinica, the Korean Academy of Sciences and Technology, and is an honorary member of the Institute of Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Lifetime Member of the Optical Society of America and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He received an A.B. degree in mathematics, a B.S. degree in physics from the University of Rochester, and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as 34 honorary degrees.

Professor Alex Pentland 

Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences at MIT, co-creator of the MIT Media Lab and founder of the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics Labs

Professor Alex Pentland is a global expert on AI and data analytics and secure distributed information systems that support such analysis.  He has more than twenty years’ experience in financial, social, and engineering aspects of building, operating, and evolution of these fields.

Professor Pentland began his career as Lecturer at Stanford, then transferred to MIT to help create the Media Lab and later the Institute for Data, Systems and Society.  He advises the OECD, and formerly the UN Secretary General, EU Presidency, World Economic Forum, Google, AT&T, Telefonica and Nissan, as well as many start-up firms.

He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and has won numerous awards and prizes, including the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, the Brandeis Privacy Award, AI Influencer Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as many scientific awards.

Professor Miguel Hernán 

Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health and Director of CAUSALab

Professor Miguel Hernán uses health data and causal inference methods to learn what works. As Director of the CAUSALab at Harvard, he and his collaborators repurpose real world data into scientific evidence for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness. His work shapes health policy and research methodology worldwide.

Professor Hernán joined the Harvard School of Public Health in 1999, becoming a professor in 2011 before being appointed Kolokotrones Professor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2016. In 2021, Prof Hernán was named Director, CAUSALab, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and he is also an Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

He is currently as Associate Editor of Annals of Internal Medicine, and Editor Emeritus of Epidemiology, and previously as Associate Editor of Biometrics, American Journal of Epidemiology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Professor Hernán has been awarded the Rousseeuw Prize for Statistics, Rothman Epidemiology Prize, and the MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, and has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Statistical Association.

The Applied Econometrics Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Stanford University

Professor Guido Imbens

Professor Guido Imbens is The Applied Econometrics Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) and Professor of Economics in the Economics Department at Stanford University. He is also the Chai-Siriwatwechakul Faculty Fellow at the GSB. He has held tenured positions at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University prior to joining Stanford in 2012.

Professor Imbens specializes in econometrics, and in particular methods for drawing causal inferences from experimental and observational data.

In 2021 he shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with David Card and Joshua Angrist for “methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationship”.

Professor Imbens is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of St. Gallen and Brown University. In 2017 he received the Horace Mann medal at Brown University. Currently Imbens is Editor of Econometrica, one of the leading academic journals in economics.

Professor Jack Dongarra

Recipient of the 2021 ACM A.M. Turing Award, Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Foreign Member of the Royal Society, Emeritus Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, Distinguished Research Participant at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellow at the University of Manchester’s School of Mathematics, and Adjunct Professor at Rice University’s Computer Science Department.

Professor Jack Dongarra has been involved in the design and development of high performance mathematical software for the past 40 years, especially regarding linear algebra libraries for parallel machines, vector processors and cloud environments. His work with numerical and communication libraries as well as his other research efforts have seen him win numerous awards, and earned him membership in the US National Academy of Engineering, appointed as a foreign fellow of the Royal Society in the UK, and as a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Science.

In additional to his work in respect to numerical libraries, Dongarra has been a major driver in the creation of de facto standards (PVM and MPI) that have been widely used in computer and computational science

Dr Edward Jung

Edward Jung is a global expert in innovation ecosystems, with 40 years of experience in software, R&D, entrepreneurship, and startups in multiple countries, with scientific expertise in mathematical physics and biophysics.

An avid inventor and entrepreneur, Edward holds more than 1,200 issued patents and founded more than 40 organisations in the areas of biomedicine, computing, networking, energy, and material sciences.

Edward founded Intellectual Ventures in 1999 after leaving Microsoft Corporation, where he was chief architect and co-founder of Microsoft Research. His biomedical research in the 1980s in protein structure and function was published in journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Biochemistry.

Edward has served as an advisor to numerous non-commercial organisations, including the National Academy of Sciences, Harvard Medical School, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and World Health Organization.

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Intellectual Ventures

Professor Marcos López de Prado 

Global Head – Quantitative Research & Development at ADIA, Professor of Practice at Cornell University's School of Engineering, Research Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (U.S. Office of Science), and Professor of Practice at Khalifa University’s Department of Mathematic

In recognition of his work to advance the adoption of machine learning and supercomputing in investing, Prof. López de Prado has received various scientific awards, including the National Award for Academic Excellence for the year 1999 by the Kingdom of Spain, the Quant of the Year 2019 Award by The Journal of Portfolio Management, and the Buy-Side Quant of the Year 2021 Award by Risk.

Before joining ADIA in 2020, Prof. López de Prado was a Partner at AQR Capital Management, and a Senior Managing Director at Guggenheim Partners, where he managed up to USD 13 billion.

Since 2011, Prof. López de Prado has been a research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science). He has published dozens of scientific articles on machine learning and supercomputing in leading academic journals, and is a founding co-editor of The Journal of Financial Data Science. Prof. López de Prado is the author of several popular graduate textbooks, including Advances in Financial Machine Learning (Wiley, 2018) and Machine Learning for Asset Managers (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Prof. López de Prado earned a PhD in financial econometrics (2003), and a second PhD in mathematical finance (2011) from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He completed his post-doctoral research at Harvard University and Cornell University, where he is a faculty member. Prof. López de Prado has an Erdős #2 and an Einstein #4 according to the American Mathematical Society.

Professor Alex Lipton

Global Head – Quantitative Research & Development at ADIA, Visiting Professor and Dean’s Fellow at HUJI’s School of Business Administration, Professor of Practice at KU’s Department of Mathematics, and Connection Science Fellow at MIT’s Media Lab.

Professor Alex Lipton joined ADIA in 2021 in the position of Global Head - Quantitative Research & Development in the Strategy & Planning Department. In addition to his role at ADIA, Professor Lipton is Co-Founder of Sila, Visiting Professor and Dean’s Fellow at HUJI, and Connection Science Fellow at MIT. He is also an advisor to several fintech companies worldwide. 

Previously, Professor Lipton was Co-Head of the Global Quantitative Group at Bank of America. Prior to this position, he was a senior manager at Citadel, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Bankers Trust. In parallel, he held visiting professorships at EPFL, NYU, Oxford, and Imperial College. Before becoming a banker, Professor Lipton was a Full Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois and a Consultant at Los Alamos. 

In 2000, Professor Lipton received the Inaugural Quant of the Year Award, and in 2021 the Buy-side Quant of the Year Award by Risk Magazine. He authored/edited 11 books and more than a hundred scientific papers on topics stretching from thermonuclear fusion and astrophysics to monetary circuits. Professor Lipton is an Associate Editor of several journals and a frequent keynote speaker at international conferences.